The 2017 Branner &amp; Stump Fellows Exhibition surveys the experiences and findings of Tristan Blackmore, Ryan Conroy, Emily Gallivan, Kyungmin Hwang, Lee Kuhn, and Jonah Merris after their international travels. Free and open to the public!

The Fellowship recipients will give presentations about their research at the 2017 Branner & Stump Fellows Lecture on Wednesday, February 7 at 6:30pm in 112 Wurster Hall. Following the lecture, a reception will be held in the Wurster Gallery. Open to the CED community!

ABOUT THE FELLOWSHIPS

The John K. Branner Traveling Fellowship and the Harold Stump Memorial Traveling Fellowship are prizes for international travel and research awarded annually to Master of Architecture (M.Arch) students, ranging from $10,000 to $20,000. Both Fellowships support independent travel in exploration of a particular architectural question or issue. Although the topic of research may optionally be expanded as a thesis, it is expected that the experience of travel will enrich the fellows design studies.

The John K. Branner Fellowship was established in 1969 for the purpose of maintaining and providing traveling fellowships to outstanding students of architecture at CED. Since the fund was established, there have been a total of 187 Branner Fellows. The fellowship fund is named for John Kennedy Branner, a prominent Bay Area architect of the early 20th century and the elder son of Stanford Universitys second president, John Casper Branner. After completing his degree in architecture at Columbia University, Branner pursued travel and study in Europe, which he believed was formative to his development as a designer. Upon returning to San Francisco, Branner maintained a successful practice specializing in residential architectural design for 46 years. His principal works include Stanford Stadium, numerous residences in Hillsborough, Palo Alto, and Woodside, several fraternity houses at Stanford, and the Mein Estate in Woodside.

The Harold Stump Memorial Traveling Fellowship enables an outstanding architectural graduate to spend up to four months exploring significant architectural monuments in Europe and other parts of the world. The student is encouraged, through independent travel to achieve a greater understanding and appreciation of the art and architecture that has influenced the architectural profession throughout history.

TRISTAN BLACKMORE

POWER AND ORNAMENT

POWER AND ORNAMENT

Ornament is the embellishment of a surface and a social relationship between people and ideology. It is employed in the reproduction of power of the dominant class as part of a constellation of prescriptive social codes and behaviors, all of which communicate with a hailed subject via explicit icons and learned symbolizations. The topic is expansive  histories of material extraction, labor, conspicuous consumption, and class are explored, and this study considers them through the lens of 19th-century European culture to ask: What does ornament want?

Emily Gallivan researched architectural responses to death and mourning in a range of religious contexts. Burial sites express a range of formal and spatial qualities based on cultural views of the soul, reincarnation, burial methods, and other influences. Study areas included monumental cemeteries in Italy, interviews with members of the Parsi community in Mumbai, funeral preparations for Thai King Bhumibol Adulyadej in Bangkok, and the military cemetery in Seoul, South Korea.

KYUNGMIN HWANG

POLYCHROMY: ACCEPTING OR DENYING

POLYCHROMY: ACCEPTING OR DENYING

The use of color is one of the strongest points of contention and dispute in the history of architecture design. Amid this controversy, there have been two different ways for using color or painting: accepting boundary and denying boundary.

LEE KUHN

THE INDESTRUCTIBLE BUILDING

The Genbaku dome in Hiroshima, partially destroyed by the atomic bomb (Image Left); and Unite dhabitation by Corbusier, in Marseille, France (Image Right)

Some buildings resist destruction, but but it is thorny to disentangle to what degree this indestructibility is by design, happenstance, or cultural protection. This project attempts to disentangle the various sources of building longevity, and in particular examine how architects can (or cannot) control the permanency of their projects. Looking at a number of diverse buildings and structures, the research documents aspects of indestructibility ranging from material choices and waterproofing to political designations, such as UNESCO world heritage status.

JONAH MERRIS

FIGURATIONS OF GROUND

REFIGURING GROUND

If architecture in practice commonly imagines a figure in ground, how can ground reimagine architecture in situ? This research documents the design and construction of ground as a spatial proposition, with specific emphasis on sites of coastal land reclamation.

RYAN CONROY

STATE OF THE STATELESS: DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE IN UNRECOGNIZED STATES AND CONTESTED TERRITORIES

STATE OF THE STATELESS: DOMESTIC ARCHITECTURE IN UNRECOGNIZED STATES AND CONTESTED TERRITORIES

Ryan Conroy's research investigates the relationship between political conflict and the development of new domestic architecture. From Japanese metabolism to Israeli brutalism to Catalan symbolism, significant architectural developments are often born of intense social upheaval. This project follows a larger interest in architecture's role in authoring local identity, and argues that political conflict is an accelerator for the expression of cultural identity in built form. The same questions about domesticity and political identity asked in places of conflict are nevertheless latent in peaceful cities and regions around the world. This proposal seeks to find what can be learned from radical housing projects in service of designing domestic spaces everywhere.